Jane Tennison deserves a whole lot better than this
Televised policiers owe much to Prime Suspect. In Jane Tennison (originally played by Helen Mirren) it created an indelible icon, a flawed, brilliant detective railing against institutional prejudice, incompetence and people calling her “ma’am”, before any of those attributes had become clichés. Crime drama has since moved on, but its influence lingers. And while you can’t blame ITV for returning to the well, you’d hope the broadcaster might have treated one of its towering achievements with a little more care and ambition.
Prime Suspect 1973 joined 22-year-old WPC Jane Tennison (Stefanie Martini) as she faced misogyny and malpractice while trying to subtly expand her brief beyond making tea and writing up traffic violations. A handily timed murder presented the perfect opportunity.
The case, like the excellent production design, was 1970s London to a fault. A murdered prostitute (what else?) turned out to have been the daughter of respectable middle-class types, while a grizzled gangland kingpin (Alun Armstrong) butted heads with other wrong ’uns while plotting a bank robbery from the inside. Life on
Mars – also set in 1973 – conjured more compelling mysteries and characters, with greater insight and wit, all inside single episodes rather than sprawling six-parters like this.
Certainly, you can’t fault Lynda La Plante’s instincts. Having bailed on
Prime Suspect half way through its 15year run, she also walked away from this production, reportedly over casting concerns. To be fair to Martini, she could have lodged a similar protest over much of the writing. Based on La Plante’s own bestseller Tennison, the script gave her precious little to work with beyond a perfunctory glimpse into her home life, relying far too much on prior knowledge of Tennison’s future. As she showed in ITV’s recent Trollope adaptation, Doctor Thorne, Martini can convey vulnerability and naivety with consummate skill. It’s the hint of inner steel that was missing, but then even Helen Mirren would have struggled to breathe much life into material this inert.
Elsewhere, the casting was optimistic at best and misguided at worst, with Jane’s superior officer DI Bradfield (Sam Reid) a particular collector’s item for aficionados of sullen pouting. Prime Suspect 1973, however, didn’t really tell us anything about, past or present, that we didn’t already know, and with such a workaday narrative at its heart, there wasn’t much else to cling on to. With the likes of Line of
Duty, Unforgotten and a reinvigorated
The Attack: Terror in the UK (BBC Two) was a peculiarly bombastic title for an impressively sober, sombre examination of the thing that still keeps Richard Walton, the Met’s former Head of Counter Terrorism Command, awake at night – and how it might come to pass. That thing was known as a Marauding Terrorist Firearms Attack: a shoot-to-kill rampage in a crowded urban area by one or more people. Such an event was, Walton told us, “highly likely”.
The drama documentary drew me slowly but irresistibly into the story of Joseph (Arnold Oceng), a vulnerable young father and small-time crook who was converted to Islam and then radicalised in prison (or “the university of Jihad”, as one fictional anti-terror copper dubbed it) by hardline Islamist Ahmed (Waj Ali). Once released, and abetted by recent returnees from Syria and distant gangland contacts, Ahmed plotted their route to instant martyrdom while Joseph, now known as Yusuf, had his tentative grasp on normal life loosened for good.
All the while, they were gradually identified and targeted by police and their deep-lying informers as the day of reckoning drew closer. In the event, as the newest recruit, Yusef was the only one to evade their attentions. The programme cut away at the moment he reached for his weapons. A very wise editorial decision, for what could possibly be learnt from seeing what most probably followed?
Alarming statistical and factual inserts punctuated the action (there are, for example, over 1,000 highpriority terrorism suspects in the UK, but only the resources to watch a fraction of them full time). Despite the odd wobble, The Attack never fell off the tightrope between reassurance and scaremongering, even if moderate Muslims seemed under-represented and their impotence overplayed at times. Nonetheless, this felt informative, ominously plausible and worryingly thin on practical solutions.